Restaurant review: Cork's Sultan serves delicious street food and classic home cooking
Sultan Cafe Restaurant & Shisha Lounge
- Sultan Cafe Restaurant & Shisha Lounge
- Unit 5, Penrose Wharf, Penrose Quay, Cork, T23 X284
- Opening Hours: Mon to Sat, 5pm to 11.30pm
- Tel (021) 241 4272
- facebook.com/Sultan.Cork
- Sultan Food Stall, Marina Market, Centre Park Rd, Cork, T12 YX76 (closes 8pm)
It can be a tall order to drag dining consumers out of their comfort zones, away from those city centre locations where hospitality establishments traditionally cluster, always seeking to reduce to an absolute minimum the high-heeled totter from bar stool to dinner table to homebound chariot.
Sultan, a Lebanese-Moroccan restaurant owned by Tunisian Ali Sultan, breaks the trend, away from the heart of town, in a business centre unit on a three-lane artery road along the quays. With too much traffic and too little footfall, especially after dusk, it has to work hard not to be out of sight, out of mind.
Earlier that day, we visit Sultan’s lockdown offshoot. The Marina Market was a phenomenon of Leeside’s Covid, a giant warehouse in the industrial centre of the docklands, housing a wide range of street food stalls. An enormously popular destination when all else was shuttered, it has been somewhat quieter since full re-opening of hospitality, and it will be interesting to see what happens next. Today, we are here for Sultan’s take on the French Tacos (singular, despite the ’S’).
A French Tacos is a mutant hybrid of panini, kebab and burrito, usually including halal meat and apparently originating from amongst the fast food outlets of the North African community, in or around Lyon, in France, at the beginning of this century. It is now one of the most popular fast food dishes in all of France, French Tacos chains springing up all over the country. It has also become a cultural flashpoint.
To the nativist far-right Front National—which once ran with the slogan, ‘ni kebab, ni burger, vive le jambon-beurre’ (‘Neither kebab nor burger, long live the ham and butter sandwich’) — it is a travesty visited upon French cuisine and by extension, the French way of life. For its myriad fans, not entirely up their own arses, French Tacos is a cheeky upstart, cocking a very more-ish snook at the stuffiness of classical French cooking. It is a monstrous beast, however; brace yourself!
Wheat tortilla is smeared with harissa (North African hot chilli paste), spicy tomato ketchup, mayonnaise and processed cream cheese triangles. This is followed by cheese slices, blue cheese sauce and carmelised onion. Ali offers three meat options: chicken, spicy Merguez sausage or lamb kebab. We mix, chicken and sausage. Then the piece de resistance: freshly fried chips. Two more sauces, taco and garlic, roll it up, burrito-style, and heat in a panini press.
Sin piled upon dietary sin, it would have my cardiologist stroking his wallet, but I’ve brought my lab rat, 14-year-old No 2 Son armed with insatiable, indiscriminating adolescent appetite.
He sets about it with swaggering confidence. Mouth too full to talk, eyebrows arch in surprised appreciation. I dredge up courage, take a chomp. Its appeal is instantly apparent, a primal response that steamrollers over guilt-ridden hesitancy, absolutely nailing the fast food formula of lethally addictive sugar, salt and fat-laden fried food, manna for the sozzled, the profoundly hungover and eternally ravenous teens. I can’t resist a second mouthful before waving the white flag.
On a biting cold day, Moroccan Spiced Chicken Soup is the culinary equivalent of hugging a stove. Rustic, textured, it runs the gamut: earthy pulses (lentil and chickpea) and vermicelli; sweet tomato and onion; garlic’s tangy hum; and a panoply of zingy spices; final dressing of fresh parsley, lemon juice and dried mint is a delightful spritely coda.
The Sultan mothership begins with a shisha lounge that leads into a long narrow room, done up like a cheery casbah, mundane ceiling tiles skillfully hidden behind billowing sails of shimmering coloured fabrics.
Starters are pleasant but I’m really here for the treasure that is the classic home-cooking of the Maghreb. Tunisian lamb tagine is a dish for the ages. Sweet, tender, succulent meat easing off lamb shank bone, a glistening gloopy stew of carrots, potatoes and chickpeas, topped with fresh parsley, mixed pickles on the side and mounds of couscous to soak up healing, spicy broth. It’s BYOB so I pair it with an excellent Bergerac (Tour des Gendres, Cantalouette Rouge, from lecaveau.ie), black fruit and grippy tannins, a sublime counterpoint and we finish with fine sweet baklava pastries. I’d highly recommend the guilty pleasure of a French Tacos but that chicken soup and tonight’s tagine are the real deal, delicious nutrition for mind, body and soul, ultimate comfort food at the fringes of the comfort zone.
- Food: 7
- Service: 7.5
- Value: 8
- Atmosphere: 8
Tab: €125 (Excluding tip)
